A group of LGBTQ YouTubers are reportedly suing the video-sharing platform and its parents firm Google over poor moderation of “hate” content and unfairly restricting the videos of LGBTQ creators.

According to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, since 2016, YouTube and Google have indulged in “unlawful content regulation, distribution, and monetisation practices that stigmatise, restrict, block, demonetise, and financially harm the LGBTQ+ Plaintiffs and the greater LGBTQ+ Community”, a report in the CNET on Wednesday.

“They flagged our pride. They did not allow us to buy ads. They restricted us. They demonetized us. And they did not stand up for us,” a YouTuber posted in a video to the site to announce the lawsuit, the report added.

FILE – Silhouettes are seen in front of a Youtube logo, in this picture illustration taken in Zenica, Oct. 29, 2014. VOA

The creators include Bria Kam and Chrissy Chambers of BriaAndChrissy.

Chrissy Chambers of BriaAndChrissy is a channel aimed at LGBTQ viewers that claimed that YouTube unfairly marked their videos as restricted, thus, limiting who could view them and how much money they could make out of it.

Another plaintiff named Lindsay Amer said the video-sharing major did nothing when Nazi trolls flooded her comments section with hate which discouraged parents from letting their kids watch her channel while others claimed YouTube’s mysterious moderators targeted videos that included the words “gay”, “lesbian”, or “bisexual”, according to PCMag. (IANS)

It is changing its methodology for reporting on 24-hour record debuts to also only count views from organic sources, including direct links to the video, search results. Pixabay

Online video giant YouTube is introducing a major change to its music chart system after discovering that artists and labels were using growth hacks to inflate how many people were watching their videos.

YouTube is no longer counting “advertising views” when it comes to the company calculating its music charts. Instead, ranking for top-watched music videos will be based on organic plays, The Verge quoted a new blog-post as saying on Friday.

“In an effort to provide more transparency to the industry and align with the policies of official charting companies such as Billboard and Nielsen, we are no longer counting paid advertising views on YouTube in the YouTube Music Charts calculation. Artists will now be ranked based on view counts from organic plays,” the company wrote in a blog-post.

YouTube to launch YouTube Music Service for its users. Pixabay

It is changing its methodology for reporting on 24-hour record debuts to also only count views from organic sources, including direct links to the video, search results.

“Videos eligible for YouTube’s 24-hour record debuts are those with the highest views from organic sources within the first 24 hours of the video’s public release. This includes direct links to the video, search results, external sites that embed the video and YouTube features like the homepage, watch next and Trending,” the blog-post added.